Exposed Challenges, Emerging Opportunities

On the global level, mobility of international students is increasingly in flux, and news reports indicate rising tensions and more and more unsafe environment for international students. Both local and transnational realities demand that our research and scholarship transcend conventional frameworks, disciplinary boundaries, and apolitical framing. We need broader, bolder visions. In particular, we must pursue our scholarship with the understanding that international students are not just a product of the modern “market,” nor, indeed, should they be seen as the byproduct of nation formation. Before there was the current idea of the market of international education and even before nations became the most dominant unit of social organization, people moved to new places to broaden their knowledge and enrich their experience, to exchange ideas between home and host communities, to make sense of life and society. If need (or greed) for food and space led to border-crossing that involved conflicts, mobility driven by curiosity and exchange of ideas has historically mitigated ignorance, fear, and violence--rather than magnify or facilitate it. Unfortunately, in modern times, regulation of bodies, then of knowledge and its exchange, by nation states (which have somehow come to be defined by conflict and competition) are increasingly clashing against common humanistic goals among nations, against globalization and against the advancement of knowledge in the interest of all. In fact, education has often been used to brainwash and intimidate, regulate and restrict the freedom of bodies and minds